Kim Kardashian's naked photo isn't shocking - but her body confidence is

We’re living in a time where women’s body image anxiety is at crashing and despondent levels

‘OMG!!! Kim Kardashian has broken the internet!’ … so said a thousand tweets, when those photos of the reality TV star dropped.

There she was, our Kim, peeking coquettishly over her shoulder in pearls and long black gloves, like an oiled up Audrey Hepburn.

Paper magazine has scored a major coup with Kim in its winter issue. Even her husband, Kanye West, who puts the ‘ye’ in Kimye, tweeted a snapshot of the cover, along with the (proud? Gloating? Lusty?) caption: ‘#ALLDAY’.

In the first of the two teaser images, Kim bared it all. Quite literally. From behind, with her black, sequinned evening gown pooled around her legs, as though she’s been caught in the act of undressing, if anyone ever really undressed like that, with a healthy glug of oil to facilitate the removal of one’s clothes.

In the second image, a recreation of the photographer Jean-Paul Goude’s iconic ‘Champagne Incident’ shot, she is dressed – phew, because I don’t think my heart can take much more of this – in the eye-wateringly tight garment, but now she has a PROP. And, with not an innuendo in sight, Kim is shown merrily uncorking the champagne bottle gripped tightly between her satin gloves, and releasing a great, frothing spray of sparkling wine which arcs impossibly over her head to land neatly in its receptacle – a glass balanced quite comfortably on her pneumatic behind. Additional images released today show Kim, fully nude, facing forwards on a plinth. Speechless.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the pictures are, on some level, shocking – we’re living in a time where women’s body image anxiety is at crashing and despondent levels, and where almost 10 million women in the UK alone report feeling ‘depressed’ because of the way they look. Research conducted last month as part of the British Social Attitudes Survey revealed that just 63 per cent of women aged 18-34 and 57 per cent of women aged 35-49 are satisfied with their appearance, and a recent inquiry by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image found that girls as young as five are worrying about their size and appearance.

Kim is a Jessica Rabbit figure, a Barbie of unattainable, seeming waif-like ly-impossible proportions. And while she admits to having a ‘bum tailor’ who resizes her clothes to fit her round behind, she has historically refuted rumours of 'butt implants', and even filmed herself in 2011 getting an X-ray to prove the absence of silicon.

If we take her at her word, then once we get over the shock of these photographs, and wind our jaws closed, then perhaps we can look past the bottom and start focusing on how refreshing it is to see a woman like Kim gracing the cover of a magazine, rather than a waif-like teenager, with bones so prominent that they hurt the eyes. I’d rather look at Kim’s amazing curves, any day.